Day 2 – Staff Meeting, Roasted Corn, and Client Interviews

Surprisingly, I haven’t been affected to much by the jetlag or time zone differences. Ghana is 6 hours ahead of Utah. Last night I didn’t go to bed until well after midnight (after having been awake for more than 18 hours), but I still got up by 9:45. Let me say how hot it was this morning. In addition, it was so noisy outside that I probably wouldn’t have been able to sleep longer if I wanted to. The place that we are staying is a 3 bedroom house which is on the second floor of a semi-busy street. There are vendors that start selling early in the morning, not to mention loud trucks, chickens, musical bands, etc… I have always been a very deep sleeper, but this may be the true test. I can’t count last night because of how tired I was, but will see over the next few nights if I get woken up by the noise.

Had a staff meeting with Whit and all of the other Burro employees where we spoke a little about the goals for Burro over the next 8 months. We have a goal to grow revenue by 20x over the next 8 months, and the surprising thing is that the goal is fairly achievable if we can focus on and nail a few key metrics.

Jennia and I spent most of the afternoon out working in the villages. We interviewed about 15 current Burro customers to find out what the like about the Burro battery offering. Each interview took about 5 minutes, but it took us over 5 hours to do all of the interviews. Of course there was a little but of driving time in there, but it just takes a long time to get things accomplished here. First of all, you have to actually find the people that you want to talk to. Next of all, it can take a little while to actually communicate what you want to say and have them understand. Some of the people speak English, with others, you have to have a translator with you. In our case today, Nat (a Burro employee) acted as our translator. He had to go out on some routes (to meet with Burro resellers and exchange the used battries for recharged ones) and would help us out with our interviews. Here are a couple of pictures of me doing some interviews, as well as a picture of Nat.

I ate some great roasted corn today. As I mentioned in yesterdays post, my new favorite food are fried plantains. Well, in case you always wanted to know what a plantain tree looks like, here they go:

Finally, just a few random photos from the day including a couple of the towns that we drove through, a picture of a school that we drove by, and an ad to help with the AIDS problem which had been a long-time problem of Africa.